Fight Club: One Versus One Hundred

This post is the first of a series about fights, battles, and how they're dealt with in fiction (no mentions of the movie bearing the same name, however). So every post this week will be about fighting.

My first topic is about the epic battles featuring the few against many, the one against one hundred. It seems to me that these days it's not enough for the hero to be outnumbered, that it's not enough for them to triumph against improbable odds. They need to face impossible odds. I don't know how this happened, but we've experienced some serious bad guy/mook inflation.

Two movies I've seen in the last year, The Three Musketeers and John Carter of Mars (mentioned last post) are prime examples of this. Both are based on books written years and years ago, and both make quite a few changes from their written version, but I'll focus on two specific fight scenes. In the Three Musketeers movie, the Three Musketeers plus our swashbuckling hero D'Artagnan have their triple duel interrupted by the Cardinal's men, just like in the book. Except that instead of five men against four, it's four against dozens.  And the fight in the book seems far closer than the one in the movie; I don't recall Athos nearly dying, nor Porthos being wounded during this scene in the movie. Instead, the Cardinal's men fall like properly lined up dominoes.

John Carter also fights off dozens of men in a climatic 'one versus one hundred' battle scene.With fury and his own Earthman strength, John Carter defeats an entire horde of the enemy, eventually leaving a giant pile of corpses in his wake. It's a pretty epic scene, to be sure, but I recall a desperate swordfight in the book Princess of Mars as well, another fight he barely won. There, it was against four swordsmen (not Tharks, and I'd give the edge to a Thark in a fight). Four. And it was close.

Here's a passage from Lieber's first Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story, Jewels in the Forest: "Fafhrd, his back to a great oak, had his broadsword out and was holding off two of Rannarsh's henchmen, who were attacking with their shorter weapons. it was a tight spot and the Northerner realized it. He knew that the ancient sags told of heroes who could four or more men at swordplay. He also knew that such sagas were lies, providing the hero's opponents were reasonably competent."

Now, the barbarian hero eventually wins, of course, but I find this passage incredibly satisfying. Because it's true. Beating two people at the same time, assuming everyone knows how to fight at least reasonably well, is pretty tough no matter how much better you are than them. If one of them can circle behind you, chances are pretty good you'll end up with a sword in your back.

But not in movies like these. These one versus many battles are just an evolution of those awful old kung fu movies, where the twelve bad guys would dance around the martial artist hero threateningly in a circle while one of their buddies fought him. Once that guy got taken out, the hapless mook would rush in, exchange a few blows, blocks, whatever, before being dispatched to make room for the next idiot.

In those kinds of fights, at least the mook gets to throw a punch or two, maybe block the first strike, something. The reason they dance around the hero is because if they charged in en masse, they'd beat him down hard and then the story would be over. In more modern fight choreography, everyone does charge in at once, and everyone dies. Because shields are dead weights, armor is cosmetic, and no one has ever heard of the concept of parrying. Instead, everyone throws themselves into the paths of punches, swords, and even bullets.

Evidently it's no longer enough for our protagonists to simply be the best, they need to so far ahead of their enemies that it takes dozens of them to pose a threat. But the problem is that it's not that satisfying to watch people fight enemies they overmatch to a ridiculous degree. No one would pay money to watch a professional boxer fight a toddler (well, maybe once), or even twelve toddlers. Maybe we need to step away from the idea that one guy can fight an army and win.

Now, obviously, there are exceptions to my argument. If you have the advantage of fortification, terrain, or surprise, then your effective numbers are much higher than your actual. If the hero's side is the only one with a machine gun, for example, then yeah, they're going to kick ass.

My next Fight Club post will be about the movie with the coolest battle scenes, and why.